Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

The headland which skirts the northern entrance of the Firth is of a bolder character than even the southern one—abrupt, stern, and precipitous as that is. It presents a loftier and more unbroken wall of rock; and where it bounds on the Moray Firth there is a savage magnificence in its cliffs and caves, and in the wild solitude of its beach, which we find nowhere equalled on the shores of the other. It is more exposed, too, in the time of tempest. The waves often rise, during the storms of winter, more than a hundred feet against its precipices, festooning them, even at that height, with wreaths of kelp and tangle; and for miles within the bay, we may hear, at such seasons, the savage uproar that maddens amid its cliffs and caverns coming booming over the lashings of the nearer waves like the roar of artillery. There is a sublimity of desolation on its shores, the effects of a conflict maintained for ages, and on a scale so gigantic. The isolated, spire-like crags that rise along its base, are so drilled and bored by the incessant lashings of the surf, and are ground down to shapes so fantastic, that they seem but the wasted skeletons of their former selves; and we find almost every natural fissure in the solid rock hollowed into an immense cavern, whose very ceiling, though the head turns as we look up to it, owes evidently its comparative smoothness to the action of the waves.

One of the most remarkable of these recesses occupies what we may term the apex of a lofty promontory. The entrance, unlike that of most of the others, is narrow and rugged, though of great height, but it widens within into a shadowy chamber, perplexed, like the nave of a cathedral, by uncertain cross lights, that come glimmering into it through two lesser openings which perforate the opposite sides of the promontory. It is a strange ghostly-looking place; there is a sort of moonlight greenness in the twilight which forms its noon, and the denser shadows which rest along its sides; a blackness so profound that it mocks the eye, hangs over a lofty passage which leads from it, like a corridor, still deeper into the bowels of the hill; the light falls on a sprinkling of half-buried bones, the remains of animals that, in the depth of winter, have creeped into it for shelter and to die; and when the winds are up, and the hoarse roar of the waves comes reverberated from its inner recesses, it needs no over-active fancy to people its avenues with the shapes of beings long since departed from every gayer or softer scene, but which still rise uncalled to the imagination in those by-corners of nature which seem dedicated, like this cavern, to the wild, the desolate, and the solitary.

A few hundred yards from where the headland terminates towards the south, there is a little rocky bay, which has been known for ages to the seafaring men of the town as the Cova-Green. It is such a place as we are sometimes made acquainted with in the narratives of disastrous shipwrecks. First, there is a broad semicircular strip of beach, with a wilderness of insulated piles of rock in front; and so steep and continuous is the wall of precipices which rises behind, that, though we may see directly overhead the grassy slopes of the hill, with here and there a few straggling firs, no human foot ever gained the nearer edge. The bay of Cova-Green is a prison to which the sea presents the only outlet; and the numerous caves which open along its sides, like the arches of an amphitheatre, seem but its darker cells. It is in truth a wild impressive place, full of beauty and terror, and with none of the squalidness of the mere dungeon about it. There is a puny littleness in our brick and lime receptacles of misery and languor, which speaks as audibly of the feebleness of man as of his crimes or his inhumanity; but here all is great and magnificent—and there is much, too, that is pleasing. Many of the higher cliffs which rise beyond the influence of the spray, are tapestried with ivy; we may see the heron watching on the ledges beside her bundle of withered twigs, or the blue hawk darting from her cell; there is life on every side of us—life in even the wild tumbling of the waves, and in the stream of pure water which, rushing from the higher edge of the precipice in a long white cord, gradually untwists itself by the way, and spatters ceaselessly among the stones over the entrance of one of the caves. Nor does the scene want its old story to strengthen its hold on the imagination.

Some time early in the reign of Queen Anne, a fishing yawl, after vainly labouring for hours to enter the Bay of Cromarty during a strong gale from the west, was forced at nightfall to relinquish the attempt, and take shelter in the Cova-Green. The crew consisted of but two persons—an old fisherman and his son. Both had been thoroughly drenched by the spray, and chilled by the piercing wind, which, accompanied by thick snow-showers, had blown all day through the opening from off the snowy top of Ben-Wevis; and it was with no ordinary satisfaction that, as they opened the bay on their last tack, they saw the red gleam of a fire flickering from one of the caves, and a boat drawn up on the beach.

“It must be some of the Tarbat fishermen,” said the old man, “wind bound like ourselves; but wiser than us, in having made provision for it. I’ll feel willing enough to share their fare with them for the night.”

“But see,” remarked the younger, “that there be no unwillingness on the other side. I am much mistaken if that be not the boat of my cousins the Macinlas! Hap what may, however, the night is getting worse, and we have no choice of quarters. Hard up your helm, father, or we shall barely clear the Skerries;—there now—every nail an anchor!”

He leaped ashore, carrying with him the small hawser attached to the stem, known technically as the swing, which he wound securely round a jutting crag, and then stood for a few seconds until the old man, who moved but heavily along the thwarts, had come up to him. All was comparatively calm under the lee of the precipices; but the wind was roaring fearfully in the woods above, and whistling amid the furze and ivy of the higher cliffs; and the two boatmen as they entered the cave could see the flakes of a thick snow-shower, that had just begun to descend, circling round and round in the eddy.

The place was occupied by three men—two of them young, and rather ordinary-looking persons; the third, a greyheaded old man, apparently of great muscular strength, though long past his prime, and of a peculiarly sinister cast of countenance. A keg of spirits, which was placed before them, served as a table. There were little drinking-measures of tin on it; and the mask-like, stolid expressions of the two younger men, showed that they had been indulging freely. The elder was comparatively sober. A fire, composed mostly of fragments of wreck and drift wood, threw up its broad cheerful flame towards the roof; but so spacious was the cavern, that, except where here and there a whiter mass of stalactites, or bolder projection of cliff, stood out from the darkness, the light seemed lost in it. A dense body of smoke, which stretched its blue level surface from side to side, and concealed the roof, went rolling onwards like an inverted river. On the entrance of the fishermen, the three boatmen within started to their feet, and one of the younger, laying hold of the little cask, pitched it hurriedly into a dark corner of the cave.

“Ay, ye do well to hide it, Gibbie!” exclaimed the savage-looking old man in a bitter ironical tone, as he recognised the intruders; “here are your good friends, William and Ernest Beth come to see if they cannot rob and maltreat us a second time. Well! they had better try.”

There could not be a more luckless meeting. For years before had the crew of the little fishing-yawl been regarded with the bitterest hatred by the temporary inmates of the cave; nor was old Eachen of Tarbat one of the class whose resentments may be safely slighted. He had passed the first thirty years of his life among the buccaneers of South America; he had been engaged in its latter seasons among the smugglers, who even at this early period infested the eastern coasts of Scotland; and Eachen, of all his associates, whether smugglers or buccaneers, had ever been deemed one of the fiercest and most unscrupulous. On his return from America the country was engaged in one of its long wars with Holland, and William Beth, the elder fisherman, who had served in the English fleet, was lying in a Dutch prison at the time, and a report had gone abroad that he was dead. He had inherited some little property from his father in the neighbouring town—a house and a little field, which in his absence was held by an only sister; who, on the report of his death, was of course regarded as a village heiress, and whose affections, in that character, Eachen of Tarbat had succeeded in engaging. They were married, but the marriage had turned out singularly ill; Eachen was dissipated and selfish, and of a harsh, cruel temper; and it was the fate of his poor wife, after giving birth to two boys, the younger inmates of the cave, to perish in the middle of her days, a care-worn, heart-broken creature. Her brother William had returned from Holland shortly before, and on her death claimed and recovered his property from her husband; and from that hour Eachen of Tarbat had regarded him with the bitterest malice. A second cause of dislike, too, had but lately occurred. Ernest Beth, William’s only son, and one of his cousins, the younger son of Eachen, had both fixed their affections on a lovely young girl, the toast of a neighbouring parish; and Ernest, a handsome and high-spirited young man, had proved the successful lover. On returning with his mistress from a fair, only a few weeks previous to this evening, he had been waylaid and grossly insulted by his two cousins; and the insult he might perhaps have borne for the sake of what they seemed to forget—his relationship to their mother; but there was another whom they also insulted, and that he could not bear; and as they were mean enough to take odds against him on the occasion, he had beaten the two spiritless fellows that did so.